Bug#639689: can't upgrade perl APT::Immediate-Configure

[shirish शिरीष]

Hi all,
 I had the same issue. I was helping a friend update his friend from
Squeeze to Sid and hit across the same issue. There were something
like 1200+ packages which needed to be updated.

While just doing apt-get and aptitude could have been good enough its
possible that some packages could get removed/deleted/purged. We had
some time on our hands so we decided to go via taking bundles of
packages. Somewhere half-way down the road we tried to tackle perl and
came across this :-

$ sudo apt-get install perl
[sudo] password for shirish:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
 irssi libapt-pkg-perl libcairo-perl libclass-isa-perl
libfont-freetype-perl libgadu3 libglib-perl
 libgnome2-canvas-perl libgnome2-perl libgnome2-vfs-perl libgtk2-perl
libhtml-parser-perl
 liblist-moreutils-perl liblocale-gettext-perl libnet-dbus-perl
libpango-perl libperl5.12 libpod-plainer-perl
 libpurple0 libsnmp-base libsnmp15 libswitch-perl
libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libuuid-perl
 libxml-parser-perl perl-base perl-modules perlmagick pidgin pidgin-data
Suggested packages:
 irssi-scripts libgtk2-perl-doc libdata-dump-perl tcl8.5
tk8.5snmp-mibs-downloader libterm-readline-gnu-perl
 libterm-readline-perl-perl make imagemagick-doc
The following packages will be REMOVED:
 libperl5.10
The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libclass-isa-perl libgadu3 libperl5.12 libpod-plainer-perl libswitch-perl
The following packages will be upgraded:
 irssi libapt-pkg-perl libcairo-perl libfont-freetype-perl
libglib-perl libgnome2-canvas-perl libgnome2-perl
 libgnome2-vfs-perl libgtk2-perl libhtml-parser-perl
liblist-moreutils-perl liblocale-gettext-perl
 libnet-dbus-perl libpango-perl libpurple0 libsnmp-base libsnmp15
libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl
 libuuid-perl libxml-parser-perl perl perl-base perl-modules
perlmagick pidgin pidgin-data
27 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 1 to remove and 918 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/30.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 13.1 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'perl'. Please see man
5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details

I googled a bit and came across a bug
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=188161 but could not
understand the workaround given there.

I also saw the debian bts and saw a similar bug-report of a gentleman
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=636048 the curious
part was that the maintainer hadn't closed the bug.

Now I am not really a man reader and a casual reading of the manpage
referred did not tell me the solution. The solution came by itself way
later . I think it was only in the last 50-100 updates left that it
upgraded to perl 5.12 without complaining. I am still not sure what
the issue is/was.
-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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